3.1.1 Search engine categories

3.1 Search engine market configuration
3.1.1 Search engine categories
The world of search engines is not as uniformed as we could have think. I
until now identified three kind of search engines:
· Standard: the most well known search engines such as www.google.com,
www.livesearch.com (Microsoft) , Ask (http://www.ask.com/?o=312) they are
looking for any kind of information through the Internet and are characterized
by a very light interface:

Illustration 2: A light interface: the homepage of the search engine www.ask.fr

· Portals: may be the most complex search engines to analyze on a figures
point of view. Portals are characterized by a lot of information on their home
page including the search engine function. It is then difficult to make the
difference here between the success of the portal and the success of the search
engine on this web page. The best example I found is the one of mail.ru
which is the most visited website in Russia far before Google. It seems when
looking at the search engine statistics that the research made on Mail.ru are
not accounted or that no one is using the search function of Mail.ru. So it is
sometimes hard to measure the success of some search engines. The most
well known portal is Yahoo.

Illustration 3: Home page of the Mail.ru portal

Specialized search engines: they to my point of view belong to a
subcategory of the first group. The major problem of standard search engines
is that they are too big. Specialized search engines are then no more than a
special function which is working as a filter. It is then far more easier to find
the information you are looking for on a specific website rather than using
standard ones. A good example of it can be the one of Ebay, it is of course far
more convenient to go on the Ebay website and use the search engine directly
from there rather than going on Google and writing a request such as 'Ebay
buying socks'. I mentioned it again but in most of the cases specialized search
engines are not a revolution they are just one part of standard search engine
and are not a new technology by themselves.